A few months ago I wrote about waiting with a friend as she was walking the last leg of her earth journey. Today I am waiting for Oakley and Julian, two Nigerian Dwarf goats, to birth their babies. They are two days overdue now, and I have been attentively (maybe obsessively so) waiting since about four days before their due date. This other-end-of-life waiting reminds me of the fullness and completeness of waiting for the end and beginning of things.
For what are you waiting during these early months of a new US presidency? What am I seeking as I wait to see how changes will affect me and those I love, those we have considered Allies and not-Allies, and people at the margins, and creatures and forests and oceans and tundra that have no vote or voice?
This asks for a different sort of waiting.
Of late I've been taken with the wisdom that what we look for is what we find, in each other and in the world. If I seek beauty I will find it, if kindness, I will see it. If I look for destruction, I'll find that, too, and if I focus on the brokenness residing in all human hearts, it will surely be evident. Might it be prudent to ask what has my attention and focus, and how that shapes the largeness or smallness of my heart--that is, how I live, walk, and respond to what I encounter every day?
What has our collective attention will just as surely shape how we collectively walk in the world. If we individually and collectively seek (and respond) to the good with gratitude and hope, how does that impact the world? If we seek (and respond) to the broken that is also always present, what does that contribute?
This is not a call for naive optimism that refuses to acknowledge that the world is shaken by chaos impacting our socio-economic-ecological-political landscapes, but is a hard won resilient optimism that recognizes a deeper Life holds all things together. I've been hearing a voice emerging amidst the fear, chaos, anger and criticism. This new voice--coming from expected and unexpected corners--encourages hope, love, beauty and kindness. Increasingly I learn of people turning away from the news, and instead taking walks and meeting friends, and posting pictures of daffodils and sunsets instead of guffaw and disgust. They are looking with gratitude at life, seeing beauty and goodness, and mercy unexpected. I am drawn to this path. They send lovingkindness to family, friends, strangers, and even some toward those they would call enemies.
It is a hard won path.
I'm inspired and want to join in traveling through these times remembering we, and all of this, are part of a deeper story that invites us to live from places of gratitude, which inspire us toward love. Julian and Oakley will birth their babies in spite of political alliance shifts, and crocus and daffodils have already pushed up from their winter slumber in spite of a changing global climate. Life emerges to grace the world with newness and declares, "Hello dear one. My name is Breath of Life, Divine Spark, Christ. Take heart. My Love keeps the universe from coming apart."
Yes. Things will change, and not all of them in the direction toward which we hope. Yet I can choose to look for that of God in all people, creatures, creation--and keep open the way for that of God in me to see that of God in you, and you and you, and even in those who do not acknowledge such a thing as a Divine Spark, and in those whose spark is but a pilot light barely kindled--yet burning and full of potential.
Joy unexpected comes when I touch this kindredness with all created people and beings. It inclines me toward lovingkindness--like that expressed by members of my North Valley Friends Church community who (two each week) stand outside our local Hispanic church on Sunday mornings providing a presence that eases discomfort a tad for attendees desiring to worship with their community. They know we are prepared to politely ask anyone in uniform for identification and a warrant rather than to let them interrupt the sanctuary uninvited. ICE workers too, carry that of God, and I choose to assume some feel their own discomfort and ambivalence about their Sunday worship-disrupting task.
Quakers (and other contemplative traditions) hold that that of God is within everyone, and George Fox encouraged us to go cheerfully into the world, living with integrity that that of God in us may see that of God in others. It is a waiting witness of a different sort, the long game that chooses to see all things as sacred, as bearing a Divine trace, treasured, loved, and held by God who will draw all things together.
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